News

Why Grandad is making our babies ill

One baby has asthma; another is obese. But it isn't just their diet or their upbringing that is to blame. Science has now discovered another culprit: history. It turns out that our bodies are programmed to live the lives of our grandparents. Report by Sue Armstrong

This sounds like crazy myth, not cutting-edge science: your asthma is your grandmother's fault - for smoking. Your weight issue is because Great-Grandpa Harry was raised in poverty and taught to grab any crumb he could. Your depression is the result of a long-dead relative's fears. You inherited their problems long before you were conceived, but that doesn't get you off the hook. How you live will affect your children's children. Your own unhealthy lifestyle is putting future generations at risk.

Genes come into all of this, but they are only half the story. There's a mysterious mechanism that acts upon your genes so that, at best, you turn into the fittest, most efficient machine you can be in your environment. At worst, you get ill or miserable, or both. A growing number of scientists are convinced that it's when this mechanism goes awry that we see the strange new epidemics